Software

  • Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 – Yesterday saw the release of the Web Platform Installer V2, by far and away the easiest way of getting and installing IIS, .Net, SQL Express, PHP, and a whole bunch of tools, extras and applications. If you’ve not tried it, I highly recommend it
  • Web Deployment Tool 1.0 has shipped! – The Web Deployment Team announce the official release of the Web Deployment Tool 1.0, a tool that makes it easy to package up web application, migrate them between servers, keep your webfarms in order, all by way of command line and MMC tools
  • Announcing Web Application Toolkits – Microsoft release 7 toolkits for web application developers intended as a quick step up the ladder to allow you to quickly add rich functionality to your web applications. The kits cover IE8 extensibility features for web apps, bing search integration, REST services, mobile apps, templated email, social networking and FAQs
  • Six Ways to Help Customers Extend their Web Sites – Mark Wisecarver highlights a number of IIS related tools which recieved an update today as a part of the WebSiteSpark programme announcements.

Information

  • Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program – ScottGu shares the announcement of the enw WebsiteSpark programme, which joins DreamSpark and BizSpark as being an excellent way to get hold of Microsoft software when you are starting out. WebsiteSpark is aimed at web developers, and includes server licenses for Windows Server and SQL Server, along with web development tools such as Expression and Visual Studio. Enrolling in the programme is free, but there is a $100 cost at the end of the 3 year programme
  • Why is covariance of value-typed arrays inconsistent? – Eric Lippert takes a look at the way arrays are handled in the framework, and how the differences between the C# type system and the CLI type system can lead to some interesting results
  • PostSharp – Introducing PostSharp 2.0: #2 – Amazing Runtime Performance Enhancements – Gael Fraiteur talks about some of the major performance improvements which have been made to PostSharp 2, looking at how the generated code has changed to bring about such improvements
  • Content Aware Image Resizing… in JavaScript – Ajaxian highlights some work by Stéphane Roucheray creating a content aware image resizer in JavaScript using the HTML5 Canvas element to enable the image processing. I find Content aware resize to be quite an interesting topic, and its always nice to see a new implementation
  • Debugger Visualizers not working in ASP.NET Medium Trust – Rick Strahl highlights one of the limitations of running your development websites in medium trust mode, the debugger visualizers can’t operate in the debugger when connected to a medium trust (or lower) process
  • Adventures in System.Diagnostics – The Intermission – Ralph Wheaton continues his series on using System.Diagnostics to direct trace logs to various logging targets. In this post, Ralph discusses some strange exceptions he encountered using the TraceSource caused by a full event log.

Community

  • SQL injection attacks and tips on how to prevent them – Colin Angus Mackay will be talking about SQL Injection, looking at the problem, along with what you can do to prevent such injection attacks at the Dundee Scottish Developers event on the 28th October.
  • Scot Alt.Net – AltNet Beers – Tonight sees the Scot Alt.Net group host an AltNet Beers event in Glasgow, with special guest Seb Lambla. These events are a hour long open conference, followed by good discussion in the bar afterwards. Well worth attending.

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